Instructors have a new free resource to help them integrate content from TED talks into their courses....Instructors have a new free resource to help them integrate content from TED talks into their courses. TED has teamed up with publisher John Wiley & Sons to create PC- and iPad-based content that can be used to support lessons on happiness studies and statistics, with more on the way. TED is a non-profit organization that holds events drawing experts and presenters from multiple fields to share their work and thinking in a plethora of areas. Those "talks" are recorded and freely shared on the TED Web site.

TED Studies, as the new program is named, combines recorded TED video sessions on a given topic and adds essays and activities to round out each set of programs.

courosa/Flickr As Chief Content Officer of a learning company, people frequently ask me: “Won’t all of your content eventually be free? After all, when technology enters the market, free is right behind it.” Then they’ll point to something like the music industry, where annual revenues have declined more than $20 billion from their peak over a…

The aim of the DOAJ is to increase the visibility and ease of use of open access scientific and scholarly journals, thereby promoting their increased usage and impact. The DOAJ aims to be comprehensive and cover all open access scientific and scholarly journals that use a quality control system to guarantee the content.

According to the College Board, the average undergraduate student should budget between $1,200 and $1,300 for textbooks and supplies each year. That’s as much as 40% of tuition at a two-year community college and 13% at a four-year public institution.

For many students and families already struggling to afford a college degree, that is simply too much – meaning more debt, working longer hours, or making choices that undermine academic success.

About one-fifth of undergraduate medical students in Egypt have heard about MOOCs. Students who actively participated showed a positive attitude towards the experience, but better time management skills and faster Internet connection speeds are required. Further studies are needed involving enrolled students in large representative samples, to assess their experiences using MOOCs. In addition, more effort is needed to raise awareness among students of such courses, as most students who had not heard about MOOCs did show interest in participating once they became aware of the courses.

When MOOCs rose to prominence, Daphne Koller was one of the first to point out their promises for democratizing education. MOOCs, for example, are made available to everybody with Internet acces, including countries in the developing world, who now had access to educational content from top universities, as Koller said. In this lies the danger of cultural imperialism and I have reported on this in these pages as well as written about it (in the now defunct MOOC Forum journal). Still, these are mere opinions, I had never seen any data about the actual appreciation of MOOCs by students in developing countries, until this paper was brought to my attention, that is. Hidden in the text is the one precious sentence which states that cultural issues did not appear to be a problem for the (Egyptian) students canvassed (through a questionnaire). In stead, other problems were mentioned, general ones such as a lack of time and more specific ones such as insufficient bandwidth. Altogether a very useful study, certainly for MOOC providers who have confessed to want to cater for the needs of students in developing countries. @pbsloep

"The goal of the Explorer is to provide OER advocates with rigorously modeled, data-based arguments that they can use in conversations with a wide range of stakeholders (faculty, administration, students, policy makers, etc.)."

Key TakeawaysMOOC critics are concerned about low overall completion rates, but these rates are typically evaluated without accounting for student intentions.This study, based on survey and log data from nine HarvardX courses, investigates how completion and attrition rates differ based on students' self-reported intentions about course participation.The study found that, on average among survey respondents, 22 percent of students who intended to completea course earned a certificate, compared with 6 percent of students who intended to browse a course.Efforts to personalize MOOCs based on self-reported intentions should be conducted with care: many students who do not intend to complete a MOOC do so, and most who do intend to complete a MOOC are not successful.

iterating toward openness pragmatism over zeal – aut inveniam viam aut faciam Stop Saying “High Quality” by DAVID on MARCH 27, 2015 The Open Business Models conversation at the Hewlett Foundation grantees meeting (#oer2015) was a lot of fun. The biggest surprises to me were the number of times the phrase “high quality” came up, and what a strong, negative reaction I had each time I heard the word.

After some reflection I think the reason the phrase gets my goat is that “high quality” sounds like it’s dealing with a core issue, while actually dodging the core issue. The phrase is sneaky and deceptive. (Now I don’t mean that the people who were using it were trying to be deceptive; they weren’t. But the phrase itself tends to blind people.) And by “core issue” I mean this – the core issue in determining the quality of any educational resource is the degree to which it supports learning. But confusingly, that’s not what people mean when they say that a textbook or other educational resource is “high quality.”

It’s very easy to demonstrate that “the degree to which it supports learning” is the only characteristic of an educational resource that matters. If an educational resource is written by experts, copyedited by professionals, reviewed by peers, laid out by graphic designers, contains beautiful imagery, and is provided in multiple formats, but fails to support learning, is it appropriate for us to call it “high quality”? No. No, no, no. A thousand times no. Despite this fact, which is intuitively obvious, when people say “high quality” they actually mean all these things (author credentials, review by faculty, copyediting, etc.) except effectiveness. In the world of textbooks and other educational materials, “high quality” describes the authoring and editorial process, and is literally unrelated to whether or not the educational resource supports learning.

In this way, saying “high quality” obscures the issue we should care about most. Instead of letting people and companies off the hook by checking boxes during the pre-publication process, we should care about whether or not a particular resource supports learning for each of our particular students. Seen this way, the true desideratum of educational materials is “effective.” I really don’t care what the pre-publication processes was like as long as my students are learning (unless the process was unethical in some way).

So please – let’s stop saying “high quality.” We don’t want “high quality” educational materials – we want “effective” educational materials. In the future, when you catch yourself saying “high quality,” stop and correct yourself. When you hear others say “high quality,” take that teachable moment to help them understand that the phrase is a ruse. If we can change this one element of the education conversation, we’ll have done something powerful.

(And don’t forget – when materials are so expensive that students can’t afford them, they are perfectly ineffective.)

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Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) have continued to attract considerable media coverage as governments and universities respond to the open and online education movement. Three years after the MOOCs began its rise, it is clear that the HE institutions in the EU are gaining speed in this movement. This report on MOOCs intends to contribute to literature on MOOCs in Europe. Its specific aim is to present data on the perception and objectives of European higher education institutions on MOOCs and the main drivers behind the MOOC movement. In addition, the report makes a comparison with similar studies conducted in the United States in 2013 and 2014 and to data produced by the European University Association (EUA) between October and December 2013. The report made clear that involvement is still increasing, but also that arguments to get involved differ from those in the US. The main source is a survey conducted by the project HOME - Higher education Online: MOOCs the European way, partly funded by the European Commission’s Lifelong Learning Programme. The survey was conducted in October - December 2014. In total 67 institutions responded out of 22 European countries representing in total about 2.8 millions of students.

This EADTU report presents and analyses the results of a survey conducted by the HOME project between October and December 2014. It presents data on the perception and objectives of European higher education institutions on MOOCs and the main drivers behind the MOOC movement. In addition, the report makes a comparison with similar studies conducted in the United States in 2013 and 2014. The report made clear that involvement in Europe is still increasing, but also that arguments to get involved differ from those in the US.

The Ford Foundation announced today that it is adopting an open licensing policy for all grant-funded projects and research to promote greater transparency and accessibility of materials. Effective February 1, grantees and consultants will be required to make foundation-funded materials subject to a Creative Commons license allowing others, free of charge and without requesting permission, the ability to copy, redistribute, and adapt existing materials, provided they give appropriate credit to the original author.

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